Thoughts on science, history and philosophy of science, atheism, religion, politics, the media, education, learning, books, films, and other fun stuff.

I am a theoretical physicist and currently Director of UCITE (University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. I am the author of three books: God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom (2009), The Achievement Gap in US education: Canaries in the Mine (2005), and Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress and Religious Beliefs (2000). Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are my personal ones and are not those of UCITE or Case Western Reserve University. If you wish, you can send me an email by clicking here.

March 10, 2008

The propaganda machine-1: The third tier pundits

When I was interviewed recently on Blog Talk Radio about my 2005 posts about the people I call third tier pundits and the baleful influence that they have on political discourse, I didn't really have the time to go more deeply into how it is that they got to play the particular role they currently play. It would be a mistake to think that they are merely the flotsam brought to the surface by media currents. They play a vacuous but integral part in a propaganda machine.

Third tier pundits are those people who occupy almost the bottom rung of the punditry world, the value of their contributions rising just barely above that of the people who write graffiti on bathroom walls. The most prominent examples of this species are people like Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, and Dinesh D'Souza but unfortunately there are many, many more. In fact, it seems like there is a seemingly endless supply of such people, available at a moment's notice to appear on TV and radio and fill up newspaper op-ed space or the shelves of bookstores, spouting a predictable line of nonsense. But while they add little, they fill a significant niche in the media world and it is interesting to see what the purpose of that niche is and how they fit into the overall structure of the media. As Jonathan Schwarz says about the whole species:

A few weeks ago I wrote something comparing Michelle Malkin's moral and intellectual standards to those of Holocaust deniers. But I also said Malkin has no significance in and of herself; every country has people as strange and confused and angry as she is. What matters is that normal societies leave them to fulminate in their parents' basement. In contrast, troubled societies let them organize "conferences" and guest host national television programs.

In an absolute sense these third tier pundits are not important because they have nothing important to say. But understanding how they became a ubiquitous presence can give us insights into how the media is currently structured. The next series of posts will focus on this topic.

The first tier pundits are those people who actually have useful things to say. They often have deep specialized knowledge in some area. They are grounded in reality and data, do careful analyses, have a good historical and global perspective, and are not narrowly blinkered by nationalistic or jingoistic sentiments. They are not quick to rush to judgment and often have their own sources and do some original reporting and thus have new information to add to their thoughtful analyses. These people tend to write for opinion magazines (both online and traditional) that do not have huge circulations and a few of them sometimes appear on TV talk shows, though not the high profile ones. Their names tend to be not very well known to the general public, being familiar mostly to political junkies.

Some of the first tier pundits are Noam Chomsky, Norman Solomon, Howard Zinn, Edward Herman, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katha Pollitt, Matthew Yglesias, Steve Benen, Juan Cole, Stephen Zunes, Robert Jensen, Jonathan Schwarz, the pseudonymous Digby, Justin Raimondo, Ken Silverstein, Jim Lobe, Ray McGovern, Bill and Kathleen Christianson, Greg Sargent, Josh Marshall, Paul Craig Roberts, and Alexander Cockburn. (In writing this partial list, it struck me that there were only three women in it and (as far as I know) no people of color. I am not sure why that is. Have I overlooked some people or is punditry more appealing to men? Or is this another instance of women and minorities having to struggle to break through traditional barriers?)

The second tier pundits are far less informative but much better known than the first tier. They consist of widely syndicated columnists who have regular access to the op-ed pages of the major news outlets. They appear often on the high-profile TV talk shows. These are people such as David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Broder, etc. Their names are usually familiar to those members of the general public who follow politics even casually. They are people who consider themselves and each other to be 'serious' commentators. They do not use inflammatory language. They are courted by political figures who desperately want their approval.

But notwithstanding their serious tone, as I have discussed before, their analyses are most often shallow and greatly inferior to those of the first-tier pundits. They do, however, serve an important ideological purpose, which is to limit the range of 'acceptable' opinion to the narrow piece of turf bounded by their views, and to advance the agenda of the pro-war/pro-business party that runs the country. While the analyses of these people tends to be ideologically driven, lack content, and sometimes don't even make much sense, reading them is not entirely a waste of time since they give you a good sense of what the agenda of the ruling class is, what they want you to think.

The third tier pundits are near the bottom of the barrel. They are to journalism and political analyses what Paris Hilton is to acting, i.e., people who have become well known for reasons that have nothing to do with any intrinsic ability but, as a result of our celebrity-obsessed culture which assumes that if one is well known there must be a reason, have now have become fixtures on the public stage. They are a waste of time and airspace and their views range between the silly and the despicable.

Next in the series: Examples of third tier punditry

POST SCRIPT: Believing myths

Forget about who can answer the phone at 3:00am. Hillary Clinton was interviewed in June 2007 on the Christian Broadcasting Network and said the following:

Reporter: Can I ask you theologically, do you believe that the resurrection of Jesus actually happened, that it actually historically did happen?

Clinton: Yes, I do.

So here in the 21st century we have a potential president who believes in something that violates scientific laws, not to mention plain common sense. The sad thing is that not only are such questions considered reasonable to ask but that every candidate for any major elected office in the US would probably feel obliged to answer the same way, even if they felt that these were absurd things to believe in. They probably can not even evade the question by saying that religion is a private affair, because that would lead to the sneaking suspicion that they are rational and scientific thinkers, who use logic and evidence to come to their conclusions, and we can't have that in a president, can we?

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Comments

Mano, I so enjoy your blog, and have learned a great deal from it. But I must argue with your characterization of Maureen Dowd as not using inflammatory language...Her commentary is often smart and she wields a rapier wit, but her prose is hardly non-inflammatory. That's just my 2 cents.

Your point is well taken. In fact, when I was writing this post I had the nagging feeling that "inflammatory" was not quite the right word.

It is true that Dowd et. al. do incense many of their readers so they are inflammatory in that sense. What I meant was that they do not use language like 'moonbats' (as Malkin does) or 'faggots' (like Coulter does) to achieve their effect. They do it more genteelly than their third tier counterparts.